Report on the second workshop on supporting complex search tasks

There is broad consensus in the field of IR that search is complex in many use cases and applications, both on the Web and in domain-specific collections, and both in our professional and in our daily life. Yet our understanding of complex search tasks, in comparison to simple look up tasks, is fragmented at best. The workshop addressed many open research questions: What are the obvious use cases and applications of complex search? What are essential features of work tasks and search tasks to take into account? And how do these evolve over time? With a multitude of information, varying from introductory to specialized, and from authoritative to speculative or opinionated, when should which sources of information be shown? How does the information seeking process evolve and what are relevant differences between different stages? With complex task and search process management, blending searching …